Back in Junior High I read Princess, Fighting Man, Chessmen and Thuvia.
I reread *A Princess of Mars *a couple of years ago.
I don’t recall Carter’s back story aside from being in the USC cavalry, the transport device, nor the shaping changing, teleporting guys. How much was made up for the film, and what comes from books I’ve not read or forgotten?
Great film, BTW. I told Mrs. Plant about the Red Martians having eggs, and suggested that like Tom Bombadil, it was one of those things best left out when making a major motion picture from a classic novel.
I haven’t seen the movie yet but I remember in the books there is a mention of a color on Mars that doesn’t exist on Earth. I can’t imagine this made it into the movie.
I read them all 20+ years ago, when Heinlein referenced them so heavily in “The Number of the Beast.” I’d always avoided them beforehand because the cover art with the 4 armed green men and the semi-naked woman just looked so cheesy. Edgar Rice Burroughs was quite the story-teller, though, so I ended up reading all the John Carter, Tarzan, and Pellucidar books.
I’d just started re-reading A Princess of Mars in preparation for the movie. Overall, I thought they did a good job. I loved Tars Tarkas and Woola. I didn’t really like the “I was traumatized by the war, and I don’t want to fight” transformation they did on John Carter, though. In the book he was unapologetically a warrior.
I don’t remember anything about the Therns (sp?) in the book — I think that’s a concept they made up for the movie.
I wasn’t really in love with scientist Dejah Thoris from her first scene — but once she started being warrior Dejah Thoris as well, she grew on me.
A big improvement they made from the book, IMO, was getting rid of the petulant “You insulted me so I’m not even going to knowledge your existence” princess. ERB went to the well too many times with that little soap opera plot artifice, so I was glad to see it go.
I imagined Tars and his guys being much more muscular, but I guess logically (if we may use logic in ERB books) they would be skinny in the light gravity of Mars.
The reference to light in the movie was “the ninth ray” I think which was a magical ray that was actually used to create the atmosphere of Mars artificially … the Martians actually had a plant which created the atmosphere that all the Martians breathed, without it, the planet’s life dies. The ninth ray created atmosphere when it interacted with the ether that surrounds all the planets. The idea that the planets are surrounded by a medium called ether was once a valid scientific theory, it was discarded when it proved to be completely wrong, but I’m not sure if it had any currency a century ago when Burroughs was writing.
And the ninth ray business was probably an outgrowth of the fact that at the time Burroughs was writing, X rays, gamma rays and magnetic fields were still exciting and new, and there COULD be perhaps some mysterious hitherto undiscovered ray that had all the effects Burroughs described.
I suspect that is what is meant when Dejah describes Mars airships as traveling on light.
The Therns don’t appear until the second book - The Gods of Mars. Unlike the movie, they are just a parasitic priest-kingdom using the faith in the goddess Issus to dupe the rest of the Martians.
In “A Princess of Mars,” Dejah Thoris’ flier gets shot down by the Tharks while it’s on a mission charting Barsoomian air currents. And she is familiar with Earth because she has studied it with the astronomy instruments in her father’s palace. So, I think making her a scientist in the movie was kind of a natural leap, and I liked it. It seems she was a scientist, even if Burroughs didn’t come out and say so.
In the book, the emperor, Tardos Mors, is her grandfather … not her father. And he doesn’t force her into the marriage with Sab Than. She does that on her own to save Helium, after she thinks John Carter is dead. I didn’t like the movie having Tardos Mors try to force such a “fate worse than death” on her. It’s just out of character with the near reverence all Helium has for its beloved princess. But I can see the drama it lends to the movie, and Lynn Collins chewed some scenes nicely playing off it.
Burroughs actually describes Tharks as being very skinny rather than muscular. I think they absolutely nailed the look in this film (to be fair, it was probably the illustrator of the novels who nailed the look decades ago, because the Tharks inJohn Carter might have stepped off the cover of my copy of “A Princess of Mars”).
The Therns appear later in Burroughs’s series, but I think the film needed a big bad bogeyman so the director accelerated the introduction of the white race and axed the original ending.
It depends on which artist does the book covers. Burroughs’ descriptions were pretty vague. They apparently had tanks full of the Eighth Ray to provide lift. You can visualize that as a boat, or as a blimp. Though as I recall, they generally seemed to have a deck on the upper side of the craft. So, I think Burroughs may well have visualized them as boatlike.
